I find it interesting that "bold" became canonised as a standard word processor font style, but "light" did not.
I'm adding more font styles to Twine 2, but I wonder if people will be ready to use them, being new additions to our "typographic language".
This probably also explains why small caps as emphasis is also scarce: the costly ardour of shrinking already-tiny capital glyphs.
I assume this was purely technical: fonts originally displayed at 1px thick on monochrome monitors precluded lightening them any further.
I also like how it's inspired by the "Death March" from SAIS's inspiration, Star Control II – replicated in miniature, in a miniature game.
I like that this unexpectedly forces a new, rare challenge on you - changing the original goal of the game right from under you.
And unless you quickly gather enough resources to destroy the fleet, your home planet is destroyed at the game's end, and you lose.
But every so often, you're given a session where you slowly discover that a powerful alien fleet is invading the sector, star by star.
As you know, every SAIS game starts out with the general goal of collecting loot and planet data and such, and for most sessions that's it…
I maybe mentioned this but I really like how the "invasion sessions" in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Weird Worlds work.
"Find the secret Hell Zone and battle your favourite demons: Asmodeus, Azazazel, Blastocyst, Venusaur, Judas's Spinning Head, and more!"
"If a locksmith is caught calling another locksmith, they must resign from the profession forever – tending only to latches and deadbolts."
"Press X to fight. Press C to boss fight. Do nothing for 30 seconds, then press X to solve puzzle. Arrow keys move, except when they don't."
"Her Creaminess will live again!" chant the acolytes as they hoist the coffin full of melted ice cream into the Resurrection Freezer.
Naked, hairless test subject sliding out of a nutrient vat, stumbling across the lab, then climbing into a different vat next to the window.
You hug the statue to open the secret door. You expect it to be cold, but instead, a shiver runs up your spine… She was here! She's ahead!!
"Okay… I admit it… I never mastered all five elements! I faked my slime powers all along! It was just mud powers with green food colouring!"
"Phooey! I could lick that mega-beast with both arms and legs tied behind my back!" *flops on the carpet, headbutts the air threateningly*
It took awhile to adjust to your new home in Bat Zone… You didn't think the bat wing-shaped vegetation would ever feel warm and welcoming…
You try to tell the shrinking machine that you want to "shrink up", in the hope that this hunkajunk mightn't be totally useless for combat.
The Leech Lapis was relayed to your throne room over mountains by a thousand couriers… sipping bits of their souls through all their fingers
Paleolithic space marines sternly welding the cave entrance shut with burning branches
"The plan for the riddle chamber was to unleash the man-eating gorilla, then watch it use its "raw primate superintelligence" to solve it."
"This is enemy lines! There are no allies! Your rifle is your sole means of survival!" *takes bite out of barrel* *sucks oxygen from muzzle*
I want to unfav some of these and remove them from the list, but it may be impossible without re-faving them and sending a notification. >_>
I'm scrolling back through all my favs, and it seems after about 5.5 months, the Favorited link just… burns out?
I don't know many other web or GUI interface elements that work quite like it. It seems in a league of its own.
I find Tumblr's "drag between the tags to scroll right-to-left" in dashboard posts kind of a weird interface, esp. given how opaque it is.
"Patch notes: Level 37, "The Block Puzzle So Hard It's Practically Sentient" no longer has an emergent AI unwittingly encoded in its rules."
"I'll never be liked," sighs the evil clown stage 4 boss. "No one thinks I'm fun. One of my attacks reverses your controls, for God's sake!"
I'm considering making the word "story" in Twine game dialogs customisable.
"High-level Poker players can show confidence in their hand by burning one card. Yikes! Imagine how powerful their remaining cards must be!"
"Hailer nodes: As the body's "volume knobs", they control the loudness of every organ. Set your stomach to max to gross out your friends!"
The maintenance bots that crawl out your ears during the night are caught by your new schedule. You wake at 7AM with your face dismantled.
You know the law. These cops can only banish you to a time abyss for 24 centuries without charge, and then you have to be unleashed.
Your clients don't mind if you submit articles after your deadline, but it's tough finishing them while being chased by an invincible ghost.
Hopefully in Twine 1.4.2 I'll make the engine automatically hoist @import code to the top, saving you the bother.
http://twinery.org/wiki/frequently_asked_questions?&#how_to_import_google_web_fonts - A caveat with the CSS @import code has been brought to my attention (added to that section as a boldfaced note).
The most adherent pyjamapunks have been known to carry toothbrushes in their mouths for days at a time, dubbing them "the new cigarette"…
The disparate sub-cultures of "Night Pyjamapunk" and "Morning Pyjamapunk" tend to clash over bed-hair and blanket-ruffle aesthetics.
Fortunately, their supplied screenshots seem to always be taken at the game's "true" resolution (such as http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2/308734/18575-shot1.png - 797x447).
The problem with Mason Lindroth's games being loose SWFs is that you have to fiddle to get the cool pixel art at 1-to-1 resolution.
More interesting effects could be created by setting the items to be destroyed if the player touched an invisible switch in the room.
So, special effects could be jury-rigged by placing a "before" image in front, hiding prizes behind it, and putting an "after" image behind.
The item's sprite would be "removed" by drawing over it with what was behind the item. This would "punch through" anything in front of it.
However, if you took a prize item and layered it behind one of these images, something buggy would happen when the player collected it.
Custom graphics in Glider PRO houses were largely limited to static images that you arranged like any other level decoration.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/74648040339/glider-pro-art-museum - The weird thing about Glider PRO is that most of these cute custom effects depended on, essentially, a redraw bug.
(Explicit <br> elements actually make certain things that depend on DOM structure, like HTML in passages, a bit more difficult.)
Suddenly I'm wondering why Twine even needs to generate <br> elements at all if I can just do .passage { white-space: pre-wrap; }
Holding your toaster up to the ceiling so it can finally brush it with its toast and fulfill its life dream before you toss it in the trash.
"I'll just use shampoo instead of shaving gel," you thought. "What's the harm?" Now your legs are 90 ft tall and wrecking the city! Slacker!
"A newborn is the size of a bowling ball."
*photo of baby next to bowling ball*
*rest of manual is photos of babies next to bowling balls*
*removes digitally edited lollipop from mouth*
*stubs it out on the ground*
*walks away as digitally edited "sugar ghosts" rise off it*
A team of omnipotent gremlins constantly altering your reality so that the CSS "font-style" property becomes "text-style", and vice-versa.
Remember to whisper "Impossible… all this time… they knew?!" at arbitrary points in conversations while darkening the background behind you.
"Come to me, Evil Teen Enemy Team" cries your Shadow Empress, zapping you out of maths and into your rad purple mech-suit on the Moon. Rock!
"Til next time, kids: eat twice a day, doesn't matter what, kick stuff so yer bones don't wither, and breathe out everything ya breathe in!"
"Our servers run a SWAMP stack," says the Amphibian Resources frog, "Slime, Water, Acid, Mud and Peat. Your duties are to drink them daily."
The only reason this party member is even considered "the wizard" is because they keep reading that book of Magic Eye pictures.
http://is.gd/rpH0iu - I just found this thing and now I'm groaning horribly, just shaking my head at the audacity of this.
You frantically hit the "emergency stop" button. The computer mockingly cries "Nooo! Bewwmmm… blip!" – and then "Aww" as you weep in defeat.
Her smile is like a Mandelbrot of sheer wickedness. The more you look, the more you see in every crease a world of irresistible suffering.
"If a sunflower grows taller than six feet, it becomes legally human and gains all our powers. Just a warning in case you make fun of 'em."
A reminder: in Twine you can do this https://twitter.com/webbedspace/statuses/381688760171122688 and you can also drop an image file into the story map to instantly import it.
The good news is I fixed drag-and-drop not working in Twine OS X by just updating wxPython, so I'm gonna call today "won" and take a break.
She plants a harsh tickle on the back of your head. Mouths you didn't know you had open all over. She smiles – but still just with her face.
I feel like they bespeak an era where festooning playful piecemeal effects on your GUI was fresh and surprising – an era now past.
http://www.mf2fm.com/rv/dhtmlclicksplosion.php - No joke, I sorta feel oddly jealous of these sparkly cursor scripts.
Bleep, bloop, it's videogame fanart. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=8645614)
"Nothing's more subversive than drawing characters celebrating holidays they have no knowledge of, like St. Backup's or Torrenting Sunday."
"Raw computational power is at your fingertips. You feel it quiver at your touch. Rake your nails over it to unleash intense productivity."
You can tell you're flubbing up this boss fight by the rapid cuts to all your friends watching with "you're flubbing this up" expressions.
You were so sure calling on the combined power of all Earth's slugs would at least do ~something~. There's gotta be tons of slugs, right???
"The unfrozen 1993-2002 patients rapidly perished due to overexposure to the word "blog"… They never had a chance to develop an immunity."
#IPlayed Alleytris http://cymonsgames.com/alleytris/ I like how succinctly this expresses one of the "points" of Tetris (while not being quite as deep)
#IPlayed Stark for Art's Sake http://afrightfulrelease.tumblr.com/post/74223424787 Fairly well-written; Passages are sensibly divided and of pleasing length.
#IPlayed A Cold Grave https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/184024/acg8.html Nice-looking one-act Twine homicide game.
Leon Arnott: Your 79-Sammer Pal
I think when I actually tried that I died at #79 or something.
http://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Sammer_Guys – I just remembered that after you beat Super Paper Mario you can go back and do the 100 Sammer Guy gauntlet for real
"I am a sculptor" cries the swordsman. "I can see your wound, ready to be born!" You hope the rest of these "themed foes" have better lines.
If anyone has any thoughts or feedback about this feature's lack of uptake, I'd be glad to hear.
Twine 1.4's been out for two months, and only six stories used the embedded image feature? And one of them's mine??
"The royal tulips must only be watered by tears of sorrow… Don't even THINK of pulling your nosehairs to make your eyes water… I'll know…"
"It's healthy to be afraid of your first drive in a dagger-shaped bullet-speed NecroCar. Remember: on the first time, Everybody Screams."
Her cruel fingers bounce off your armpit's energy shield. But wait – she's hacking the controller with her mouth and reversing its polarity!
You're entirely invisible except for your fingernails – but don't worry, you've spent days practicing wiggling them like a swarm of bees.
You agreed to pay one finger per sentence from this informant – but you're five down and she only just got to the Empress's undergarments!
You think of the one time walking to high school where you swear you double-jumped in real life. Maybe you can only do it once per lifetime.
The great thing about the Javascript console is it's always there, wherever you surf. You're always a few keystrokes from mirth and wonder.
(If you're finding the first line confusing, note that I don't need to wrap it in an immediate function, but did so solely out of habit.)
Now I just did it with indexOf, and I'm literally sweating at how much chaos this could potentially unleash.
(Explanation for the second: String#slice implicitly converts the array into a string - had I done slice(0,2) it would return "0,")
I'm messing around with the Javascript console again, and let me tell you, I find this behaviour ~fascinating~.
I feel like that's a slightly more meaningful age milestone than turning 30 or whatever.
There's only 81 days left before I reach my DAY 10K (which is when I turn 10,000 days old).
"In the year 2000, all technology will be holographic. Break your fridge? Now you have two smaller fridges! Hand them down to your kids!"
You wake up to find a piece of paper in the back of your mouth. Small handwriting reads "plz eat more tiny hammers + wood planks ok thx".
The worst happened. Your evil shadow-self beat you, and is now malevolently sitting on your chest and dangling a spit strand over your face.
It's only two days before crying is outlawed, but you just can't muster any final tears! This is a catastrophe. You're on the edge of panic.
(The solution is that if the files have a byte-order mark, Dropbox will correctly serve them as UTF-8. It's a little inexplicable.)
However, I've just looked up and found an obscure solution that seems to make it serve them correctly, and will implement it in Twine 1.4.2.
Just a reminder: Dropbox still serves Twine 1.4.1 files as ASCII instead of Unicode, so it isn't recommended for hosting if you use it.
"You thought you'd be safe in Fight City if you moved to the Peaceful District. But even an ultimate fighting adventure… has its Level 1!!"
The kaleidoscope has just one lonely bead in it, trying its hardest to look like a multitude.
"The last episode reveals the characters were all haywire robot mannequins that "just happened" to act like conscious humans for 5 months."
"The frisbee that Matt throws at "just the right speed and angle" so that it "will never come down" is actually painted on the camera lens."
"Despite having an inexplicably vast supply of coasters to use as toys and weapons, the characters always rest their drinks on bare tables."
Your body has made a lot of weird noises in your life, but this wet squelching crunch as a slimebeast bites it in half has topped the list.
"No human, horse or beast can withstand such heat!" you think as the dragon spits fire to give the sun a sweat (from warmth, not jealousy).
You dodge the log by moving your feet left, hoping your body is carried with them. Sadly, it does not, and is slain. Pick a foot to play as.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Stork_Ride/ - While I was meaning to test something else, I unwittingly just did a perfect Stork Ride game (810 points).
The vampire assures you his "bat-like power" of lifting 20 times his mass is perfectly normal, as is his bat-like sonic energy mouth-blasts.
The dilapidated StreetlampBot lights up as you walk under, notices that you too have the OmniVision implant, and ashamedly turns off again.
There's motion sensors here. For safety, you peel your shadow off the ground. It gets frayed by your nails, and wails as you scrunch it up.
"Hard to believe this cabinet leaning on the Hell Door's knob was the only thing protecting humanity." *adds two nightstands and an ottoman*
"There are ways to tell whether you are in a dream. Make your hands melt away into goo. If they don't grow back, then you're in real life."
"You may have licked me once… but this time I will send you to Hell!" *unsheathes giant postage stamp*
"The limits of your imagination are the only bounds of your creativity in this game! Pursue any goal inventable! Visualise anything!"
If you know of any free Twine games that aren't on this list, do feel invited to link them to me.
This list basically serves as a replacement for @indiegamehunt's TwineHub (http://twinehub.weebly.com/) though that wasn't my original intent.
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/ - I've updated my Twine archive file, and now have a list of all the thousand-ish Twine games contained within.
The words "To begin, tap here" are chiseled in vast letters on a two-hundred-foot block of marble.
The other other thing I'm bothered by is users uploading 5 versions of the same game, because there's not an obvious way to amend an upload.
I'm also a little perturbed by how many people have made Twitter accounts just to post one game on @philomela_twine and then abandon them.
#IPlayed timelines http://philome.la/aqender/timelines/play This feels satisfyingly muted, restrained, matter-of-fact.
I'd devised the image importing feature in Twine 1.4 specifically to counter this problem! The images can all be safely stored in the HTML.
I'm kind of bothered by the number of Twine games that use local image files, which all break when the game is uploaded to @philomela_twine.
All you need is a <title> tag, and make all the head-only tags appear before the body-only tags, and that's it, your HTML is up to standard.
I like that in HTML5, the <html>, <head> and <body> tags are all technically optional. You can leave them out and the page remains valid.
Twine users in non-English Windows locales have reported errors while building games http://twinery.org/forum/index.php/topic,756.0.html This will be fixed in 1.4.2.
Maybe being jump-kicked so hard you slammed a you-shaped wall dent isn't so bad. Maybe this dent is the comfiest place you've ever been in.
You spy a fellow worker pausing on the footpath and standing, legs spread and arms wide, surfing the continent on the tectonic waves.
The dead sailors' bodies were changed into beautiful mermaids, thus letting them finally kill humans with the impunity they lacked in life.
"Instead of rehearsing her HR seminar, she was asleep on the boardroom table, surrounded by guns. (Don't worry – they were still loaded.)"
I'm imagining the modern world that the Spelunky characters came from, and how the physics would render normal life utterly dysfunctional.
That feels like not just a easy jab at compilers, but also a sly edge-case twisting of meaning that I find particularly ticklish.
I sardonically like that JSLint is called a "good-JS compiler" on the basis that input either "compiles" to itself, or yields a parse error.
The developers struggled to decide whether to call extensions "plug-ins", "add-ons", "patch-ups", "trick-outs", or "jot-downs".
"All the court's judges were so eager to be the one to pronounce Egon Supernefarious guilty, that they let all 20 of them do it in unison."
You drink the speed potion with your mouth, increasing your mouth's speed. You eat the chocolate guards' fists before their punches land!
"Even a person's stomach can be a witch's cauldron, if they drink the potion's ingredients fast enough and are held over a fire hot enough."
You ask your lover to power-cycle you after a hard day – and you give permission to draw on your face or steal your underwear if she likes.
"Listen… they can detect the absence of saliva in your mouth. That's how they tell you're not human. So…" *vigorously makes out with robot*
With the touch of her finger, your squishy fried-egg nipples sizzle and cook. With the touch of her lips, she chomps up one and the other.
Practising hugging on pillows is distorting your skill tree. Soon you're unlocking exotic Mattress Spooning and Cushion Aftercare skills.
You're neck-deep in slime – but you brought a rapid escape balloon!
The balloon inflates inside the slime.
The slime rises over your head.
TBH, even now I find the notion of using constructor functions as namespaces – putting static properties on them – to be kind of weird.
If you don't know you can create arbitrary properties on almost anything, you can't know that ".prototype" is just a special case of that.
Actually another problem is that even understanding what ".prototype" is requires learning that functions are A: objects and B: first-class.
The pistol-blast feels like God blowing a raspberry on your belly – the same great lips that blew life into humans, blowing it out of yours.
"Parser text adventures tend to take place in a reality where humans can undo moves (an ability that only the Oops Bat normally possesses)."
The dish of fresh tears evapourates on the altar, and in a puff of stale smoke, a demon appears and crashes onto your couch, catatonic.
No! She can't feed you to the Jaws of Pleasure, the hypnotic trap you designed! Knowing what you put in it, you'd never be able to get out!!
"OK… that's definitely the largest Frogification Gun I've ever seen," you flatter, trying to briefly prolong your last moments of English.
You pursue the "dismount" verb over the prairie – in a canter, as you'd mistakenly bartered "gallop" for what turned out to be "masticate".
http://868-hack.neocities.org/music.html - I have added the final two 868-HACK music tracks to this page just now.
It's bad enough having your life energy slurped out, but it's even worse seeing them swish it around and remark on its flavours and notes.
There's a whole graveyard for the hapless Earth teens who get warped into Felinopia, shout "Whoa! A talking cat!" and are promptly executed.
"I mean, when this planet slams into that other one," she says as she ties you up, "the very idea of 'survival' just loses all meaning, eh?"
"Why doesn't the player's sprite change when the "% of flesh remaining" meter drops below half? Why does the in-game clock say "Eternity"?"
"Why would a dating sim have a hell difficulty? Why doesn't the dialogue acknowledge that your lovers have become flesh-rending devils?"
"You're gonna be in here awhile," she shouted atop the pit, "so let's play I Spy!" – knowing that her face fills your only source of light.
"The so-called "Heroic Sponsor" movies had plots so generic that any product could be written in to rescue the lead characters at the end."
I'm fascinated that America Daitōryō Senkyo (Famicom, 1988) refers to George H. W. Bush as a "WASP" in English.
http://remysharp.com/demo/marquee.html - I love that there are jQuery plugins that simply give the <marquee> element a smoother framerate.
Wikipedia pages whose text contains "as of 2006"
All I want out of videogames is for a big chubby seahorse to blow smoke in my face, and for me to fly back and bounce on my butt four times.
Why must this beautiful game have such an intrusive HUD
You pull your silk sheets higher, and fluff your furry black pillow, while marveling at how real that "captured by giant spiders" dream was.
"Sure, take all the organs ya want from my body… but if my wound heals shut around yer hands" – she grins fiendishly – "I get to keep 'em."
The swords, passions inflamed by their fierce fighting, mutually put away their humans and vigorously embrace each other.
I watched the Adventure Time episode "Red Starved" and I only just got the joke that Finn is colour-blind but Jake isn't.
Obviously if you're picking from 1 to 100, the latter is more feasible, but for the demands of most Twine games, the former is sufficient.
Also, I didn't intend either() to be used for numbers, but I'm surprised at how more readable either(1,2,3,4,5,6) is than, say, random(1,6).
(Also one thing I like about DokuWiki is that I can write [[<<display>>]] and it will link to the "display" article, ignoring the chevrons.)
(The thing at the bottom about changing the browser's mouse cursor is one fancy feature I secretly hope more Twines will indulge in.)
http://twinery.org/wiki/frequently_asked_questions - Don't forget that some easy Twine questions may have their answers on this wiki page.
Just as the sun rises, the figures in the gallery try to climb back into their paintings – only to discover they're all solid on this side.
#GlitchPix
#GlitchPix
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/GreatArtist.gif #GlitchPix
"And one last thing: if you hear the ocean in a seashell, for the love of God don't try to break it and set it free!"
The glitched coin fountain showers you – your wealth ever-rising to $65,535 and wrapping to $0. You must go, but if you're a moment late…!
(It's probably because object literals were added in a JS version after the constructor stuff, and no one updated their examples to use it.)
What I want to know is how come this became the JS constructor pattern and not this variant
Standing before this mirror background has let you see how eerily frequently your idle animation loops. You hope the player moves you soon.
Yes, this very tweet is actually a playable game! Just click the "Favorite" link to choose to blow up a distant galaxy, killing trillions.
You slide down the rain-soaked roof. No, you cry at it, you're not a raindrop, you're a person! Don't let me drain down! But it ignores you.
Spotting your foe, you run like the wind!
Silent like the wind, invisible like the wind… Oh no! You become the wind!
You billow her dress.
Due to a search engine I won't name, I keep trying to see the Google logo in this. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=32022629)
It kind of pains me that a website has forced me to add this to my user CSS file.
I'm very glad http://chiptune.com/ is still up after all these years.
If you're wondering what parameter() does, I still need to write it up, but you can figure it out from this example: http://l.j-factor.com/twine/examples/PassageMacros.tws
http://twinery.org/wiki/function – For those using Twine 1.4.1 (which should ideally be 100% of Twine users) I listed the extra functions added in it.
You float right over the pit in pursuit of the rogue element – but it shoots your clearfix! You find yourself embedded halfway in the floor.
"Musical instruments are devices for transforming finger movements into feelings of well-being. Videogames perform the opposite effect."
"Manually hoisting your Javascript vars isn't all that bad," mutters the web programmer vacantly, two red spots visible on her neck.
One of those afternoons when you dreamily wish you could buy a wind-chime's album.
"So, everyone find their coins?" *shot of boy realising he swallowed his* "Ha, son! I guess you're not worthless anymore!" *grins at camera*
"Try our Surprise Discount Meals, with loose change cooked in 'em!" *shot of kids spitting out coins while grampa just spits own dentures*
The tiny cloud zaps a bolt at your nose. It flows up your skull into your brain, and you briefly experience what clouds have instead of sex.
First-year students asking why almost every living creature's user-agent string begins with "Protozoa/5.0".
I totally forgot Star Wench has a piss-milking ending in it.
*lies back in sunny meadow* What a world
"In the year 2000, everything will be playable! You can pretend to find gold while doing your tax! It will be possible to lose at a poem!"
Reminder that in addition to the scheduled posts on http://leons-minds-eye.tumblr.com/, I sometimes just post arbitrary nonsense whenever.
I'm half-contemplating inventing the "owl face" Javascript operator as a shortcut to Object.create(null).
You look up the source code for your model, and discover to your horror that your AI is internally coded as a single file of if-statements.
You do a yawnburp so hard that your mouth pops and becomes an outie. You look at your teeth and dangling tongue and decide to brush better.
You grab the dagger tattoos off your thighs and brandish them threateningly. They can't cut anything, but maybe these guys don't know that.
You are forcibly transformed into the mobile version of yourself, while she remains in her desktop form.
As the ceiling descends, you give your body a futile anti-crushing pep talk. "OK baby, don't give in to that bad ceiling. H-hold up for me."
"It's well-known that polo shirts suppress natural spell-casting abilities. That's why so many tech companies make their workers wear them."
NAME: Person-X
AGE: ???
GENDER: ???
INTERESTS: ???
LOOKING FOR: Anyone who can show me true power.
LIKE: Black flames
DISLIKE: Light arrows
Desperately waving your only lit match back and forth in the hope of glimpsing this temple's erotic fresco in its entirety.
You soon notice that about half of the variables being passed to index.php are just compliments to make the server feel good about itself.
Given that this jam was aimed at first-time users, I guess these statistics may actually overstate Twine 1.4's conversion rate? Hmm.
Naked Twine Jam survey http://pathofnowandforever.tumblr.com/post/73212956786/naked-twine-jam-wrap-up-46-games-at-bottom-of-post:
30 used Twine 1.4
14 used Twine 1.3.5
—
44 used Sugarcane
2 used Responsive
0 used Jonah
Why did you spend hours silently naming each little gland on your sleeping lover's nipple? Why was it the most inspiring sight of your life?
"Imagine a worst nightmare's worst nightmare. Now imagine the worst nightmare wetting the bed and crying for their mother. That's our game."
Suddenly I'm fascinated by the mental image of baby sharks swimming inside a uterus, devouring cells ferociously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_White_Shark#Reproduction – "The unborn sharks participate in oophagy, in which they feed on ova produced by the mother."
"The defendant called the witness a name we can't repeat, because the stenographer forgot to write it down – but it was probably "Jess"."
"Parliament descended into chaos on Monday when a dimensional gyre to the Chaos Zone engulfed both houses" thought the newsreader to herself
"No!" shouts the actual programmer at the indentured Javascript programmers manually hoisting their vars. "You're letting the machines win!"
It just, just feels like a really iconic and whimsical way to embark on a brief journey of wonder with a magical being.
I think my favourite part of the Superman franchise is the moment in the 1978 film where Lois stands on his feet so she can fly with him.
Giant spider reclining as her cat plays with the entwined, devoured husks of her giant fly prey.
"The best part of having an upside-down vertical power bar is that when it breaks, the pointer slides down to maximum instead of zero."
So in closing, I'd be very grateful it if you took the time to download this upgrade (https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/422046812711550976). Thank you.
It's kind of a very minor detail that only I have noticed, but it still manages to bother me every time I see it. ._.
There's a bug in Sugarcane's CSS in 1.4 that puts the sidebar farther to the left of its border than what it used to
I actually have a very specific motivation for hoping that the entire Twine user base upgrades to 1.4.1.
You hear nearby characters desperately shouting their entire life stories, in hope that some part of them will survive once this tweet ends.
"In the original folk-tale version of Super Mario 64, Mario was rewarded not with a cake, but two prime milking goats."
"The good news is that although the rockets harmlessly lodged themselves in its slimy flesh, they ~should~ be weighing it down slightly."
Isn't it true that violently breaking all your home's walls and furniture is one of the most forbidden, impossible fantasies in our society?
I'm thinking back to Jumanji and Zathura and pondering the latent eroticism of fanciful creatures slowly smashing and wrecking a huge house.
As a victory run, I decided to add one more to that page. It's a little damp!
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163 - I tried making another Twine stylesheet. It's a bit too 2010's, perchance – but possibly good for period pieces?
"Why don't they release hammerhead versions of all the other animals."
Also! I've been writing some example Twine files to demonstrate some new 1.4 features. http://twinery.org/wiki/example_files Hopefully they're informative.
As far as I can tell, all the Twine 1.4 bugs listed here http://twinery.org/wiki/twine_1.4_bugs are fixed in 1.4.1, but do tell if one of them recurs.
If you've been using the new Twine 1.4.1 (https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/422046812711550976) then note that I'll be tracking bugs here: http://twinery.org/wiki/twine_1.4.1_bugs
Please alert me to any problems or discrepancies that pop up when you use this new version, so that I may apologise and amend forthwith.
This is, as you know, a maintenance and bugfix update to Twine 1.4. The changes are listed here: http://twinery.org/wiki/twine_1.4.1_release_notes
Hi. Here's some early links to Twine 1.4.1, which I've decided to release now:
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/twine-1.4.1-win.zip
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/twine-1.4.1-osx.zip
"Your body died again. You lost because of your inferior body. Wouldn't life be easier if you got rid of it? Just a tip from your computer."
"Maybe if all these videogame heroes talked it over and planned an organised attack, they'd finally manage to destroy Hell once and for all"
Damn.
"No, lemmings don't leap off cliffs, and piranhas don't strip cow corpses to the bone in minutes. It's the other way around, see."
"What, you didn't know brushing your teeth cures all status effects? What did you think it did, then?"
"One Poker move, called 'batting', involves tapping the cards in your hand as you wait. It has yet to be discovered if this does anything."
"PEEK and POKE were, in more exotic dialects, called LOOK and FEEL, YANK and STUFF, TEST and TEACH, REAP and SOW, or REEL and CAST."
"Freeze! Unless y'all want 17,000 tweets blasted in your keister!"
*everyone runs forward*
"…Wha? Wait, lemme try it."
*shoots own keister*
The word 'zipball' as a counterpart to 'tarball' instead suggests to me a powerful future-sports equipment item / robotic opponent.
That trope in cyberpunk films where the heroes laugh at the monster, not knowing it's a Flash of Unstyled Content and its claws are loading.
–Then I encounter paragraphs like this and feel sympathy for the parallel timeline that actually was saddled with it.
I'm reading the scrapped ECMAScript 4 spec, and can't help but be moved by its audacity, how desperately it tries to retcon JS's quirkiness.
This stirring web page you're reading is emotionally intense… Your mouse unfolds into a hand and clasps yours while you read, captivated…
"You don't understand! It's a free explosion!" she said, tossing rocks at the red barrel. "No effort! Totally gratis! It's like free candy!"
"This voice-control fad has to stop! Star Trek only used it for exposition! It's not good!" he shouted instead of "operator" into the phone.
You unroll the map and check the town names. New Hope, Salvation, Ark, New Dawn… looks like you're in Post-Apocalypse Kingdom.
Her dress was made of frozen screams. Were you to lay but a finger on it, one of the screams would thaw and roar throughout the castle.
"SQL isn't real programming. I mean, it's Turing complete, but it isn't–" *juts head* "~Turing complete~, y'know?" *slowly waggles eyebrows*
Before you, a large head emerges from the river. Then the head rises and the river follows, its surface dragged behind like a flowing robe.
"This 200 KB CSS reset mercilessly obliterates all browser defaults in the past and future, reducing your page to a pure, sterile waste."
Your mischievous fingers sneak typo after typo into your report. They smile inwardly as you wince and shudder during your proofreading.
I had the Ankh, but I was so incensed that I immediately spited the game by closing the window and doing some household chores.
I was just presented with the Spelunky HD scenario where your own sticky bomb bounces off the alien energy pillar and sticks to you.
"Her armour's engraved with screaming faces! Her sword with moaning faces! Howling faces on her nails! Gasping faces all over her own face!"
A new two-symbol programming language like Whitespace, but the space is a full copy of jQuery, and the tab is the full text of the GNU GPL.
"Yesterday I wore a gumboot as a hat, just to show all the squares around us that we can dare to unlock our true creative potential."
"Each player account is created having friended the final boss's account by default. Unfriending her makes the game ~much~ harder."
Vigilante annoyed that after all his work faking his death and making his costume, the press named him "Cape Guy" instead of "The Phantasm".
You fondly recount dancing on the Sun on your honeymoon – even though, since the Sun has no surface, you decided dancing on Earth counted.
Noticing you have -1201 societal respect points, the ServantBots pick you up and toss you around while still fulfilling politeness quotas.
Due to the Human Anti-Competitiveness Law, it was only legal to sell robotic implants for tasks that robots are strictly inferior at.
Do advise if you think there's any further problems with them, especially in Safari, which I wasn't able to fully test in at the moment.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5462 - I've performed a bugfix on the <<hover…>> Twine macros, which should make them behave better in most browsers.
You notice the page's scroll bar thumb growing larger and larger, until a nodebeast bursts up into view and devours the last of the content.
Finally, a proglang that lets you express that you have 17 money. (Source: ECMAScript 4 docs)
You need only step, invisible, across the dance floor. But they're dancing the Brownian Motion – the most unpredictable dance in the galaxy!
"Well, Achilles was actually slain by stepping on a Lego brick, so yeah, the retellings moved his weak spot up a bit."
Stiff, stern, stout 3.5-inch floppy disk dommed by tall, lithe, aged 8-inch
"PRINCESS: *bites lip fearfully*
SORCERESS: *bites lip triumphantly*
ADVENTURER: *bites lip determinedly*"
"Remember to be respectful of non-Y2K compliant AIs. Be careful to refer to the new year as "1914" in their presence."
"I'm gonna kick that Death God right in the patooties!" *slams phone, faces room* "I'm gonna kick that Death God right in the patooties!"
To get past, you must read the Most Boring Document in the World, then sign it. The thought of marking it with your approval horrifies you.
You finally escape from the beast's stomach only to discover that a slightly larger beast had just swallowed IT whole. And again. And again.
(Epilogue: I got clubbed by the end boss due to lack of bombs. But the important thing is that I got to record a GIF of him!)
I want to call a moratorium on "stomp ground falling debris" platformer bosses. They're… they're the platformers of platformers!!
I'm grateful that some comics got their own sites beforehand, though – like this particularly silly one: http://twentysevenletters.com/comics/experiments/panel-one/
I think it's finally reaching me that http://webcomicsnation.com is probably gone for good, and with it a good chunk of my 00's. :(
What's more decadent than having 140 chars and throwing 1/2 of em away
"Each time you put on lip gloss, that's +1 mana right there."
What I like about this is that it tells you to use a script but doesn't provide, for instance, a hyperlink to it.
"After a life of asceticism, I had two problems left. This product solved both. Were I capable of expressing approval, I would endorse it."
Teen arcade gamers fantasising about the Joust fighters flapping out and lancing their pimples for them.
You're just too light to press this button! You try to think heavy thoughts. Bowling balls! Continents! Dying young! Grocery bags at 6 PM!
This "exclusive interview with a time bomb" your editor put you up to has to be a trick. It keeps shutting you down with "tick, tock, tick".
You try to convince the mega-grubs that you're not one of their kind and you'd like to be untied, please. Their snuggles only tighten.
I'm kind of mesmerised by this excerpt of authentic 2014 web code, so please don't play with my vacant body.
"This ain't a sword, it's a ten-at-a-time letter opener, I swear."
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=manga&illust_id=16638263 - This thing is a little silly.
Everyone wears oxygen masks when visiting the aquarium so their reflections don't drown… But their reflections long to deny them the same…
On the bright side, in my most recent game I succeeded in killing Anubis... like ~this~
I just sat there… watching it to get closer… waiting for the inevitable to happen… transfixed by the hand of Fate being so gallingly tipped…
Today in Spelunky HD, I sat in the Black Market waiting to see if a snail's bubbles hitting the damsel would get ME blamed for it.
"No, the correct way to vertically center in CSS is to give it placement:top-bottom, ok-with-vertical-centering:sure, and obey-me:please."
Having hammered out your decisive 5,000-word videogame blog comment, you reach for the Submit button only to see it running for the hills.
"There's no such thing as a free lunch… except for this one here." *slowly, smugly devours it in front of millions of horrified TV watchers*
You spent so long charging your beam that when you try to fire it, it claims the power for itself, sprouts wings and leaves you for dead.
The "flingies" genre, which prominently featured actors flung backwards by wires at arbitrary times, vanished as quickly as it appeared.
"We thought that if we increased HOMICIDIAC's intelligence higher and higher, it'd eventually realise killing humans is a waste of time."
"When you flick on your game console for the first time, it's not just electricity that flows in, but dreams and wonder! So show respect!"
You feel an irritating draft – tiny miners have dug a hole through your bedrock blanket and let the surface air in. Time to wake, you think.
By chaining you to the moon's dark side, your enraged, explosive mouth-laser blasts pass unseen by the world below. The perfect prison!
The tape of screams and punches you're using to drown out your chat with your informant suddenly changes to gravel and coffee-gulping foley.
You made out with the caramel guard to get the vault password, but now your mouth's too sticky to say it…! Defeated by her lingering taste!
When they broke up, they split up their collective name. He took all the vowels, leaving her with just the cold, hard consonants.
With your nimble toes, you rotate the laser so it zaps the ropes around your waist!
But your ropes were holograms – you only zap yourself.
"The game's manual explains this by saying "In 2029, police officers can legally transform into manticores while apprehending criminals.""
Hence, Chrome regards it as incomplete input. IE 8, conversely, regards a sole label as valid nominal input, and returns undefined.
In this case, all three browsers interpret "http:" as a statement label, and "//" as a line comment.
Fun activity quiz: why do these browsers react differently to evaluating a URL as if it were a line of Javascript?
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/ - I'm finding it hard to believe that Google Wave was so overambitious that it re-engineered the scroll bar.
"This game has multiple beginnings. Your decisions and performance throughout the game determines which beginning you received."
HTML / Wiki syntax / Markdown has a good deal of syntax for document structures (lists, emphasis etc.) but few for common prose structures.
Suddenly thought of another Twine syntax possibility for a future version… Syntax for textual "voices" or "tones"…
"God, I can't believe that Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday happen on a weekend this year."
(Ideally the "let j = i" line should be a Let statement (a Let scoped just to a statement) but that isn't in Chrome yet.)
Interestingly, I think this means that i is scoped to _all_ of the loop's iterations, but j is only scoped to each iteration's interior.
If you're wondering whether ECMAScript 6's Let keyword will finally "fix" for-loop closures… …Sorta.
I guess I just find some perverse beauty in the human body suddenly being colder than the ambient environment.
I don't want to be yet another tiresome Twitter Weather Complainer, but
"How'd you die?" they ask. You were accidentally deallocated when everyone else in the world blinked simultaneously. "Our bad," they joke.
Two astronauts sneaking away from the fleet to briefly land on an asteroid and take turns punching each other into orbit.
"This financial product makes gold powder fall from your eyes for 30 years, but you can only utter 240 glottal stops per day without fees."
"Instead of slashing the chain supporting the bridge with the axe, say 'Violence always begets more violence.'"
http://leons-minds-eye.tumblr.com/post/72055682450/page-from-ballad-by-deadmouse-this-webcomic - I've taken to saving local copies of neglected webcomics – a habit that has on occasions paid off in spades.
I like it when pausing the game still permits the animated tiles to continue animating.
You want this spacebeast to behold its foe in the last moment of its life. You exit your ship. You remove your helmet. You unzip your suit
"What if blood is your body's tears. What if burning your letter in the fireplace makes it less likely Santa will read it, and not more."
"They were said to have made drawings so lifelike that if one were dropped in a puddle, the drawn people would get wet and not the paper!"
"Did you know that all of your cells are completely replaced every 10 minutes? Well, it seems to be accelerating. Please seek medical help."
Your plan to subvert the swamp demolition freeway project from the inside has proven to be less profitable than going along with it anyway.
The Pawn fought hard to advance and get promoted to a Queen, in the giddy hope that the enemy Queen would finally notice and capture her.
The pit that you just fell into now has to choose between the chasm and mineshaft skill trees.
The scientists that inscribed the complete works of Shakespeare on this atom had no idea it would eventually become the only surviving copy.
"Flat Design is just a passing fad… the real future is Masahiro Sakurai Menu Design."
http://www.smashbros.com/wii/en_uk/gamemode/various/images/various18/various18_071112a-l.jpg
"If you want to check out what happened in the past," continues the version control programmer, "you simply detach your own head."
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/Gimmick-ConveyorBombs.gif - It's funny how this platformer happens to have just the sort of mechanics to construct this looping machine with.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/Gimmick-Crabs.gif - Some cute crabs.
"This… this power… it's… nnnNNNNNOOOOO!!!" screams the boss when you hit with your first attack, as well as every subsequent attack.
The footer reads "Protected by SpamZelcher: Over 32,444,128 spams zelched!" If only you knew that "zelch" means "make vastly more powerful".
But the lede would not stay buried
https://31.media.tumblr.com/1b1bb00a31237551e9365b02da240804/tumblr_myqftgVCzu1tosyuoo1_400.jpg - This reminds me of Jim Henson's The Cube for some reason. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=244486)
http://25.media.tumblr.com/5046274b0bd2219a2ea1a1cad993eb12/tumblr_myqfdmdmRG1tosyuoo1_1280.jpg - This reminds me of @increpare's game about three artifacts. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=865324)
"Ironic, isn't it… How the missiles are destroyed by the explosions of their brethren… Felled by their own kind… Heartbreaking arcade game…"
"Mate in 14" barks the Chessmaster.
"No" says his rival, pointing to himself. "Mate in 13."
"Hah! Mate in 12!"
This continues for some time.
Forgotten goddess trying to pull your impaled body off the tusk of her only surviving statue before you become integrated with her identity.
You need just type "exit" to escape – but typo after typo falls from your fingers! "exti", "extt", "exiy" – you sing the song of your doom!
In other news, I heralded the new year by starting a generic repost/inspiration tumblr http://leons-minds-eye.tumblr.com/ Updates queued for once a day.
I wish to also say that thanking me for my macros is no longer necessary (because every game made in Twine 1.4 contains code that I wrote).
I guess my most significant achievement of 2013 was having my name appear in the "special thanks" sections of almost 50 videogames.